Three or four o’clock in the afternoon was the time I usually chose for the sport, and once I had made it a practice, all the boys and girls of the village accompanied me, or waited for me at the shore, sure of hilarious hours.  I must make children my companions, here, for my older friends were so oppressed by the gloom of race extinction that save for Malicious Gossip and one or two others, there was no capacity for joyousness left in them.  Exploding Eggs was my chum, paid as forager and firemaker, but giving from friendliness his services as a wise and admirable teacher of the unknown to one unmade by civilization.

The bay of Atuona, narrow between high cliffs covered with cocoanut-trees, was the scene of my lessons.  The tide came booming into this cove from the Bay of Traitors, often with bewildering force, and a day or two a month as gently as the waves at Waikiki.  The river spread a broad mouth to drink the brine, and the white sand was over-run by the flowered vines that crept seaward to taste the salt.  No house was in sight, no man-made structure to mar the primitive, as our merry crew of boys and girls sported naked in the surf, fished from the rocks, or lay upon the shining beach.

For my first essay I used the lid of a box that had enclosed an ornate coffin ordered from Tahiti by a chief who anticipated dying.  It was large, and weighty to drag or push through the surf to the proper distance.  Laboring valiantly with it, I reached some distance from the shore, and prepared a triumphal return.  The waves were big, curving above me in sheets of clearest emerald crested with spray, breaking into foam and rising again, endlessly reshaping, repeating themselves.

Awaiting my opportunity, I chose one as it rose behind me, and flung myself upon it.  Up and up and still higher I went, carried by resistless momentum, and suddenly like a chip in a hurricane I was flung forward at a fearsome speed, through rushing chaos of wind and water, seeing the beach dashing toward me, shouting with exultation.

At the next instant my trusty board turned traitor.  Its prow sank, the end beneath me rose, and like a stone discharged from a sling I was thrown under the waves, head over heels, banging my head and body on the sand, leaped upon by following waves that piled me into shallow water, rolling me over and over, striking me a blow with the coffin-lid at every roll.

I lay high and dry, panting and aching, while from all the beach rose shouts of laughter.  Exploding Eggs rolled on the sand in his delight, holding his gasping sides, scarcely able to remind me of the necessity, which in my excitement I had forgotten, of keeping the prow of the board pointed upward as I rode.

Often as I repeated this instruction in my mind, firmly as I determined to remember it while I toiled sea-ward again with the coffin-lid, the result was always the same.  A moment of rest in the unresting waves, a quick, agile spring, a moment of mad, intoxicating joy, and then—­disaster.  I became a mass of bruises, the skin scraped inch by inch from my chest by contact with the rough wood.  I would not give up until I had to, and then for a week I was convalescing.